Puzzle Pieces
by Miss-Murdered
Summary: Heero and Duo live together in a peaceful world but there is a piece of the puzzle missing. 1x2
1. Chapter 1

It's been a while but all I wanted to write was some 1x2 domestic fluffness. With a small size of angst. And also about the comfort of growing older together. So here it is... Also note I don't have a beta anymore so all errors are my own.

* * *

It was a repetitive rhythmic sound, gentle at the edges of Heero's consciousness and he shifted in the bed, noting the other side was empty and cold. That meant one thing. Duo had been up for a long time.

Heero rolled out of the bed, padding softly along the carpeted floor, grabbing a hoodie to wear loosely over his bare chest and boxer briefs. It never used to be like this. Duo wouldn't have been able to sneak around the apartment, leave the bed without Heero waking but it was different - years had passed. Anxiety and paranoia was now a little less close to the surface. The safety of their secure apartment complex. The reflexes and reaction times slowing. Comfort.

As he walked, Heero could hear the incessant typing, the punching down of the keys and the accompanying "ding" that signified that a line had been completed, the push of the mechanics back to the start. The noise was loud, jarring in the early hours of the morning but Heero found comfort in it. In the rhythm. In the music it made. In the image of Duo sat, curled in on himself, the lamp light illuminating his silhouette as he typed on the ancient typewriter, each movement of his fingers a note.

Duo didn't look up, his brow knitted in concentration, the haze of his e-cigarette surrounding his head, the smell faintly acrid. He was wearing a tank top, plaid pyjama pants that were always too low on his hips, bought a size too big for "comfort". His hair, shorter now, was tied up haphazardly into what Dup referred to as a "man bun" and his tattoos traced over his arms and chest and neck, linking and connecting, a puzzle of black and the occasional shocks of colour, mixing with the scars and disfigurements of skin caused by a teenage war. He was relaxed and in a deep state of concentration and Heero didn't want to disturb that.

Or maybe he did. He felt a pang, deep in his gut, as Duo had found something post-war that gave him this level of peace - writing stories of children who were too young going to war and of colonies where it was a fight to eat and they were aimed at children but they shone like a beacon, a warning about repeating history. It was getting forgotten, Heero noticed, and they were forgotten. As was right. They were faces of a war long since gone. But still there needed to be some trace memory to ensure powerful men did not repeat the past. To remember that they had sent teenagers to die.

Heero had found nothing like the typewriter and the process of writing. That pre-colony typewriter that Duo treasured like a limb, like his braid, like the ink that laced over his muscles. Heero had asked, once, why the typewriter. It was noisy. It wasn't easy to correct mistakes. It was heavy and clunky.

And Duo had grinned, a pencil behind his ears and his hands behind his head.

"I used computers to kill people. I can't kill people with a typewriter."

"You could," Heero had retorted. "If you threw it hard enough."

And Duo had laughed and laughed and laughed until he'd attacked Heero with kisses. His dry sense of humour forever amused Duo - especially when it was a quick quip that Duo deemed "un-Heero" like.

But Heero understood - laptops, computers were used for missiles and explosions and pain. And Duo liked the care, the attention, the tinkering that the typewriter allowed him - the physicality and the touch. He used marker pens and notepads on the floor once his drafts were complete - sitting in the centre of a city of papers, connecting them with coloured dots and numbers, his tongue peeking out between his lips as his brows furrowed.

Heero had nothing like that - he had worked as essentially a boy soldier his entire life. Whether that was for Preventer or for Relena's protective detail or piloting a Gundam, he had never found anything that gave him peace like Duo had. There was a piece of a puzzle missing, something that needed rearranging inside him but he had never found the thing that would restore whatever was missing. It was only as he got older that he understood that there was always something missing.

They didn't need money, they never did, with war reparations and Preventer salaries but Heero needed something like the slow rhythmic beat of Duo's fingers.

"You're watching."

Heero smiled guiltily. "Admiring the view."

Duo chuckled and patted the spot on the couch next to him. "Being a creep, more like."

Heero shrugged and made his way over to the precarious work station Duo had created for himself at the end of the L-shaped couch that dominated the living area. Sitting beside him, Heero leaned his head against Duo's bare shoulder, looking at the paper that was halfway out of the typewriter.

He glanced at the words before Duo nudged him playfully in the ribs.

"No previews."

"I only read the word 'the'," he responded as he laid himself on the couch, his head close to Duo's thigh. He reached for the blanket, covering himself, a slight chill creeping into his limbs. The things he felt now… now that the drugs and toxins and experiments had had years to leach out of his body. He remembered never feeling the cold but now it was different. Everything was different.

"It was an important 'the'" Duo retorted, "the most important of all the the's."

Heero snorted and closed his eyes as he attempted to fall back to sleep beside Duo, the rhythmic sound of the typewriter and the gentle feel of Duo's fingers in his hair lulling him to a dreamless sleep.

* * *

There was nothing that brought Heero peace like his daily run, the methodical route, the steady pace, the same time and the same early morning stillness. Colonies felt still on a morning. No breeze like Earth. No loud obnoxious birds. It felt calm. At peace. And awash with the vestiges of the morning rain cycle that had only just finished when Heero departed from the apartment complex.

He liked this time. He only ever saw a few people and it felt like everyone else in the colony was still asleep. Duo was asleep. Heero had left Duo where he was as he had commandeered the entire bed, his legs and arms making a reasonable attempt at covering the surface so there had been no room for Heero even if he had ever woken up on the couch and wanted to sleep in his own damn bed. It had made him smile, the soft snort from Duo's lips as he slept, the way his hair had escaped most of the "man bun" and the way he looked utterly relaxed.

The evidence of a successful evening of creativity was scattered over the floor - the pages numbered haphazardly and landing wherever they landed. Heero had ignored them and left for his run, knowing that Duo would sort when he awoke. He knew better than to disturb Duo's work.

The fake sky was grey, the day cycle starting gently as to imitate a sunrise on earth. Heero liked the grey light and he began to jog, slowly picking up his speed as he followed his usual route through the streets and to the large park that dominated the centre of their neighbourhood. His sneakers hit puddles, little splashes coming up to his shins and he enjoyed the feel on his skin.

Duo had tried to join him on these runs but Duo talked. And Heero didn't want to talk - he wanted the silence of an early morning, the light shimmering on the puddles, the few early morning dog walkers he nodded to every morning. It was quiet and familiar. Peaceful.

It just didn't fill the missing part. Whatever it was. It quietened the storm but didn't sate it.

There was a restlessness that he had felt since the war. He hadn't been intended to survive - either by himself or by Dr J. So he had spent the years since adapting, finding purpose in throwing himself into Preventer, protecting Relena, living and growing older with Duo. It just didn't give him the same level of satisfaction as Duo had with that damn typewriter. But it was something.

He ran harder, further, faster - taking a longer route until he stopped in the park, realising it was getting busier and it was no longer the quiet early morning he so craved. There were more dog walkers and kids going to school and people going to work and it was alive and people were talking and it was all so social. And not where he belonged. He paused, took a few deep breaths and then started to walk back slowly, no longer feeling the need to run.

The ground was no longer damp under foot as he walked, taking in his surroundings and the amount of people who had crawled out from their homes while he had been stuck inside his own head, thinking too much as he ran. He decided since the world was awake, he would take advantage of the open stores and entered a coffee shop to buy a morning treat for Duo.

A small smirk crossed his face as he purchased pastries and donuts knowing the response he would get. Duo would smile in that big honest way only Heero got to see and he would probably be dragged into the bed he hadn't slept in, kisses and bodies moving in tandem, the smell of shampoo, e-cigarettes and Duo's skin filling his senses. Yet it was as he was paying he saw the notice board and the flyer that had been printed when someone was running out of ink and he knew that he had to do something.

He didn't usually run this way. They didn't frequent this coffee shop. Yet here he was. And there it was. Maybe his detour had helped him find something missing. Heero ripped the flyer off the noticeboard and left, coffee and pastries warm in his fingertips.


	2. Chapter 2

When Duo woke up, Heero wasn't in the apartment. Which he figured. Heero had seemed particularly angsty last night and had joined him on the couch while he typed. Duo knew he'd be running off his bad mood and didn't worry. It was years since he'd worried, like he _really _worried, about Heero's disappearing acts. There had been times, years and years ago, when Heero not being there when he woke would've induced a panic that would involve Duo running through the streets to ensure that Heero wasn't at the edge of some literal or figurative precipice. Now it was different. Duo knew Heero needed space, needed his morning run and the quietness of a colony in the early morning. So he padded out of the bed in search of the coffee pot, re-tying his hair at the top of his head as he walked, it having escaped its confines during the night.

Duo saw the paper trail of his work across the floor. It needed editing, refining, changing but there was a first draft appearing among the pages on the floor and he felt that satisfaction as he gazed on his mess. Least Heero accepted his somewhat scattergun creative process. Damn was he lucky that Heero got it.

Sometimes Duo barely got it. As a kid, books had hardly been a feature of his life until the Church and then it had been the Bible and pretty much nothing else. Then there was a war. He was hardly reading Tolstoy in a Gundam cockpit. He was too busy killing or nearly being killed. It was after, in the upheaval years and the Prev years and the figuring out who the hell he was years, that Duo started to read. It was Relena's well stocked library and a boring protective detail hosted in Sanc that had introduced him to a different world. Then it led to him telling his own stories.

At first, his stories were just his own form of therapy - trying to re-piece the parts of his past into some form of coherent narrative. Then they morphed, formed into stories of kids at war and violence and how war and death changed everything…

That's when he bought the typewriter. That's when it really started.

It calmed him. Duo knew he'd been a dick at times when he was trying to figure out his own head. And in the beginning, his relationship with Heero had been volatile. Yet they always came back to one another even if a kiss was preceded by a harsh word or a shove. It was hard in those days.

Duo busied himself with the coffee, his bare feet on the cold tiles beneath his feet and he thought about how writing his books had given him a sense of self, a sense of place and a sense of worth. He just wished he could find Heero the same damn thing.

They could play the game of the most fucked up childhood - they had, once, a drinking game, or a parody of one and the other guys had been there and when Duo felt something in his eye, it maybe had been something to do with Heero's childhood. Least Duo had been _loved _at one point. Cared for. Brief as it damn well was.

Heero had never found something that gave him the same level of peace and satisfaction that Duo had. He had tried to throw himself into Preventer, into security detail for Relena, in computer defence systems but all these things were too closely aligned with violence that it seemed like Heero would never become anything more than that boy soldier.

Frowning, Duo wondered why the hell he couldn't smell coffee only to realise the machine was unplugged.

"Damn idiot," he muttered to himself and was about to rectify the situation when the door opened and with it the smell of coffee.

"I got coffee. Donuts. Pastries."

Duo grinned as Heero approached, placing the tasty smelling treats on the counter. "Have I told you lately how you are the most amazing, sexiest badass guy in the whole fucking Earth Sphere?"

In his running gear, his hair mussed and reaching into one of the bags for a blueberry muffin, Heero looked like absolute perfection to Duo. Like he always had been. They fitted together perfectly, even if everyone thought they were ill-suited, even if they'd had their trickier times. Loud idiot. Emotionless asshole. Or something like that. That's what people thought, Duo was damn sure of that.

But they didn't see the little smirk on Heero's face. "No, you haven't told me I'm a sexy badass for a while."

"Then I've been a dick... especially when said sexy badass brings me coffee and pastries."

Duo grabbed Heero then, pulling him in for a lingering kiss, the saltiness of Heero's sweat filling his senses. Heero backed away, taking a bite of his muffin and smirking in a self-satisfied way. It was as though he could predict Duo's response. He was getting too damn predictable in his old age.

"I need a shower. Eat. Drink coffee. Meet me in bed."

Duo playfully smacked at Heero's ass. "You bet."

Idly, Duo reached for a pastry and was about to take a bite when he noticed something stuck to it. His brows knitted as he looked at the flyer, clearly ripped from a noticeboard, the rip from where it had been pinned showing as much.

He took a bite and took a swill of his Americano and his brain worked overdrive. He left the flyer in the kitchen, walked towards the bedroom, cherry Danish being consumed and coffee being drunk as he went.

The sound of the shower ended swiftly and Duo finished his last bite of sweet stickiness and abandoned his coffee on the bedside table as Heero emerged, naked and dripping wet, drying his hair with his towel so that there was nothing left to Duo's imagination.

"You need to be naked for this," Heero commented wryly, his gaze on the low hung plaid pajamas and the tank top.

Duo snickered. "Come over here and make me, babe."

Heero didn't need anymore encouragement as the coffee, pastries and the flyer were forgotten in the tangle of limbs, in the press of the hard planes of Heero's body against Duo's, the feel of his hands against Duo's hips. They fitted together perfectly, bodies aligned, rutting and rocking together, Heero's damp skin underneath Duo's fingertips and fuck, Duo didn't know if there was anything more perfect that the press of the lips, the bruising kisses and the feel of Heero hot, hard and heavy against him.

Yet in the moments afterwards, in the cooling of skin and the taste of cold coffee, Duo remembered the flyer. He wandered to the kitchen, bringing the rest of the food to the bedroom and he could feel Heero's piercing gaze on his ass, on his back, on the tattoos that trailed over his skin. He had also grabbed the flyer.

Duo held it out as he returned to the bedroom and he saw Heero blink, an expression that looked vulnerable, a sort of confusion that only Duo saw.

"I think it's a good idea...though I ain't dealing with the mess."

"You're sure?"

"Hell yeah… would give a you a jogging partner too and a buddy when I'm in a manic writing phase."

Heero grabbed for him, pulling Duo down to the bed and into a searing kiss. Disentangling himself, Duo threw a bag with the muffins at Heero.

"Give me 5, 'Ro… I need food and caffeine before another round. We ain't sixteen anymore."

* * *

It felt good. He was damn near on fire. Duo was barely breathing lest he lose the inspiration he currently was surfing the crest of. He just hoped the damn typewriter wouldn't jam or he got distracted before he finished his chapter…

Then he heard it. The barking. The commotion. The knowledge that he was about to get disturbed.

"Type like the fucking wind," he mumbled under his breath even though he knew it was pointless. As a second later, the door opened and in bounded a ball of fur and excitement, a Golden Retriever suddenly attempting to lick his face and currently scampering around in his ordered chaos.

Duo only sighed and started scratching behind the ears of Buddy, the Golden Retriever they had adopted three months ago. "Good run, Buddy? Did you have a good run, boy? Was it fun? Did you see other doggies…?"

"Are you going to ask me?"

Duo looked up to see Heero, smirking at the way he'd been talking to Buddy. "How was _your _run, babe?"

"Not going to ask me if I saw other _doggies?_"

Childishly, Duo did the only thing he could do. Which was to throw a pillow in Heero's direction which Buddy thought was a game and barked louder. Knowing his writing time was thoroughly disturbed, Duo walked to the kitchen abandoning his work in progress. "I'm making coffee. And you boys better think of all the ways you can apologise to me for disturbing my work."

Heero didn't realise that Duo was watching, he thought he was making coffee but as Heero knelt down and talked softly to Buddy, Duo saw Heero at peace in a way that he had never seen before.

Looking after Buddy gave him something else. Something that Duo didn't quite get but he didn't care. It was another piece of the puzzle that made up their unconventional lives and that was all that mattered.


End file.
